Philip Levine

Frances Levine

Philip Levine is the former poet laureate of the United States, named by the Library of Congress in August 2011. He was appointed to the honorary post at the age of 83, making him one of the oldest laureates in history. A former auto worker in Detroit, Mr. Levine is best known for his big-hearted Whitmanesque poems about working-class Americans.

He is the author of about 20 collections of poetry, including “The Simple Truth,” which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize, and “What Work Is,” which won the National Book Award in 1991.

Born in Detroit, Mich., on Jan. 10, 1928, to Russian-Jewish immigrants (he once referred to himself as “a dirty Detroit Jew with bad manners”), Mr. Levine has sometimes been criticized for leaning too hard on his blue-collar roots. For unknown reasons, his parents told him he was of Spanish ancestry, and as a young man he became fascinated with Spanish anarchism and the Spanish Civil War — subjects that still turn up in his poems.

His father died when he was 5 years old, leaving the family hard up. Before embracing poetry, he held a succession of what he has called “stupid jobs” — he built transmissions for Cadillac, worked in the Chevrolet gear and axle factory, and drove a truck for Railway Express. His early poems, often written in narrow, seven-syllable lines, were gritty, hard-nosed evocations of the lives of working people and their neighborhoods.

Over the years Mr. Levine’s subject matter hasn’t changed much — he remains a distinctly urban poet — but his edge has softened. His later poems are narrative, anecdotal elegies for a vanished working-class world. Commenting on his poetry, he said, “I find more energy in my earlier work. More dash, more anger. Anger was a major engine in my poetry then. It’s been replaced by irony, I guess, and by love.”

Though he hadn’t aspired to be poet laureate, he said he was pleased that after a long career the honor had come his way. “How can I put it? It’s like winning the Pulitzer,” he said. “If you take it too seriously, you’re an idiot. But if you look at the names of the other poets who have won it, most of them are damn good. Not all of them — I’m not going to name names — but most. My editor was thrilled and my wife jumped for joy. She hasn’t done that in a while.”

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